Conceptual Design of a Small Hybrid Unmanned Aircraft System

Abstract

UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) technologies are today extremely required in various fields of interest, from military to civil (search and rescue, environmental surveillance and monitoring, and entertainment). Besides safety and legislative issues, the main obstacle to civilian applications of UAS systems is the short time of flight (endurance), which depends on the equipped power system (battery pack) and the flight mission (low/high speed or altitude). Long flight duration is fundamental, especially with tasks that require hovering capability (e.g., river flow monitoring, earthquakes, devastated areas, city traffic monitoring, and archeological sites inspection). This work presents the conceptual design of a Hybrid Unmanned Aircraft System (HUAS), merging a commercial off-the-shelf quadrotor and a balloon in order to obtain a good compromise between endurance and weight. The mathematical models for weights estimation and balloon static performance analysis are presented, together with experimental results in different testing scenarios and complex environments, which show 50% improvement of the flight duration.

Energy Management Strategy for High-Altitude Solar Aircraft Based on Multiple Flight Phases

“…Firstly, the common atmospheric environment of the flight area has been analyzed for parameters settings, and the flight location of the HSA is set to Sanya, China (109°E, 18.3°N). Meanwhile, the initial configuration parameters of HSA are listed in Table 3; they are gained from Zephyr 7 because it has a detailed and comprehensive introduction in all the literature [3,6,11,15] of HSA.…”

“…Due to the rapid development of solar cell technology, solar energy can gradually play a leader role in exploring the field of renewable and clean energy [1][2][3]. erefore, making use of solar energy to fly is a research hotspot, which has attracted a lot of research groups all around the world during the past few years [4][5][6][7][8][9][10].…”

“…Since the solar energy is renewable and inexhaustible, it has the potential to redefine and increase the flight endurance of aircraft. In the last ten years, many countries and research teams have made great efforts to develop the high-altitude solar aircraft (HSA) [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] for the reason that the HSA have the ability to stay over a wide area at high altitude for long endurance; they can function as geostationary satellites, but they are much economical [13,14]. ey are ideally suited to be widely employed in many applications such as natural monitoring, border patrol, planetary exploration, communications relay, remote sensing, field investigations, network services, and electronic warfare [14].…”

Design and Realization of an Unmanned Aerial Rotorcraft Vehicle Using Pressurized Inflatable Structure

“…A new idea for the low-altitude and low-speed aircraft was proposed in which uses an airbag to cope with the difficulties in the field of Airborne Geophysical Prospecting (Wang et al 2013). Another research work (Papa et al, 2017) discussed the main phases of the conceptual design of a lowcost electrically powered hybrid UAS for extending cruise endurance by using a lighter than air gas filled balloon. A group of researchers developed and experimented (Sharf, Persson, St.-Onge, & Reeves, 2013) with a spherical blimp developed at McGill and a cubical blimp developed at UQAM.…”

“…However wide-range coverage or long endurance missions are not feasible due to its low-speed and endurance limit (Cetinsoy, 2012;Saeed, Younes, Cai, & Cai, 2018). The current UAV's flight time is limited because of heavy lift-power needed to take off and maintaining the flight in the air (Hassanalian & Abdelkefi, 2017;Papa et al, 2017). The exposed rotor blades of multirotor vehicles are very dangerous for the animals, birds, as well as for the humans, while perfectly working and under any circumstances of system failure (Edge, Brown, & Collins, 2012).…”